Mistress Bradstreet (30 page)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . thine armies brave send out

To sack proud Rome and all her vassals rout;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bring forth the beast that ruled the world with’s beck,

And tear his flesh and set your feet on’s neck;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This done, with brandished swords to Turkey go,

For then what is’t but English blades dare do,

And lay her waste for so’s the sacred doom.
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Truly, this was Dudley’s daughter writing. Anne poured all of her pent-up anger and fear about the current political situation into these stanzas. England could save herself only through righteous warfare against the infidel, and the enemy was everywhere—Rome, Turkey, Palestine. It was not enough for England to redeem herself and purify her own church and state. She would have to launch herself into the world to spread the true beliefs of the dissenter and vanquish the “idolatries” of all other faiths.

A manuscript version of this poem was probably passed among the friends of the Bradstreet-Dudley clan long before it was published. If so, Anne’s words about the righteousness of New England would have gratified her fellow New World Puritans who had chosen not to return to England to fight the king. Such men could read her poem and feel that they had chosen the right side in the conflict. Not until England had purged herself of her sin and corruption should her colony feel impelled to help her. Those who remained in New England could see themselves as righteous instead of cowardly.

An astute reader could also have seen that Anne was firmly on the side of Parliament, a dangerous position for a colonial to assert. Although she qualified her attack on Charles by saying that anyone who was “false to king” or who “hurt . . . his crown” should be “expell[ed],” she was also blunt about which side was England’s “better part”; it was Parliament who “showed their intent, / To crush the proud . . . / To help the Church.” Indeed, in Anne’s poem Charles seems sulky rather than wise—“The King, displeased, at York himself absents”—and he blocks Parliament’s attempts at righting England’s wrongs.
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This was an exciting poem to read, packed as it was with bloodshed, predictions of the future, and a long, exhilarating recital of the monarchy’s sins. Though it seemed aimed at a larger audience than any of her previous poems, Anne did not know how it would be received by others. No other New Englander, male or female, had written such political verse about the civil war. Not only had she trespassed into male territory with this kind of political poetry, but she also condemned the king. When at last she copied it out onto paper and sent “A Dialogue between Old England and New” to her father and Ward, she waited with trepidation to hear what they thought.

Fortunately for Anne, there is no record of either man criticizing her ambition; instead both appear to have been thrilled. “A Dialogue” articulated important ideals that were close to the hearts of New England leaders. Later Ward would gloat that she had surpassed all other writers, including men, declaring, “Let men look to’t, lest women wear the spurs.”
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With the approval of these two important mentors, Anne’s confidence could only soar. While she loved her husband, it was Ward’s and Dudley’s opinions that mattered most when it came to her work.
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And she had an agenda now. Anne wanted to write in the pithy, “plaine” voice of her new home, and she wanted to add her opinions to the ongoing political debate. In other words, with “A Dialogue” she announced her intention to be a sort of pundit, a public commentator; she was intent on joining the larger world of debate and ideas, one traditionally closed to women.

To do this she would have to invent a simpler, pared-down aesthetic to match the purity of her religion and the newly settled land. This technique would take her many years to develop, but she had come to a turning point. No longer did she want to pull out all the stops and splash out the sort of froth that she had experimented with in her elegies to Sidney and Du Bartas. Her life in Ipswich may have been challenging, but it had offered her a path toward redemption. She was not the miserably uncertain girl she had been back in England and on the
Arbella.
Instead, she was beginning to believe that she did indeed possess the God-given “vocation” to shout out the words of the New Jerusalem.

Chapter Fifteen

Now Sister, Pray Proceed

To add to all I’ve said was my intent,

But dare not go beyond my element.

—
ANNE BRADSTREET,
“Air”

A
DIALOGUE BETWEEN OLD ENGLAND AND NEW”
was the first American poem to wave the New England flag. Anne’s claim that she and her family and friends should be admired by those they had left behind was made even more audacious by the fact that she was also writing in a new “Puritan” style of verse, at least whenever New England spoke. This was not the poetry of the last century, with its ponderous, old-fashioned solemnities. Nor was it like the verse of the previous generation, the English Elizabethans, whom Anne had admired when she was younger. She had flung past the elegant phrases and the complicated wit of her first poems, brandishing a biting poetic sword and inventing a “New England” who spoke in a frank, “plaine” voice that flew in the face of good manners.

At first glance, this change in style was not readily apparent. New England’s lines still rhymed like those of her mother. The poem relied on wit and allusion. But New England’s stanzas were briefer, more direct, and less flowery than anything Anne had written before. New England used brutal examples to make her points and often interrupted her mother, so that some of her lines were shorter metrically than others. This technique created a poem that at times seemed to mimic the breaks and rush of spoken language and thus seemed more choppy than ordinary verse of the period. Where were the carefully rounded turns of phrase that sounded “poetic”? Where were the beautiful images from Greek mythology? What kind of verse was this?

Sadly, Anne’s depiction of England as an ailing, weakened mother foretold a tragedy in her own life. In December 1643 Anne’s own mother was suddenly desperately ill. Although everyone assumed that Dorothy was in fine health, one morning after breakfast, just as she was compiling a list of things to do that day, she was gripped with “what felt like a gas pain in her chest . . . [and] by noon of the next day, when the doctor arrived, she was in agony.”
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A week later she died, having succumbed to death so rapidly that it was a shock to everyone.

For Anne and her sisters, it was heartbreaking to have lost their mother and to have missed the opportunity to attend her deathbed, since this was an important ritual in Puritan New England and in the Old World, too. An individual’s final moment was often a public event. Some people actually rehearsed the lines they wanted to say, as they knew they would be surrounded by their family and neighbors. The last utterance of a dying person possessed an almost sacred charge (depending of course on the individual’s reputation for piety during his or her lifetime). Often these sayings were passed along from neighbor to neighbor and were even transcribed in the family records as a harbinger of truth or a forecast of the years to come.

But in facing death, Dorothy appeared to have been as quiet as she was in life; at least no one left a record of her last thoughts. And so it was Anne, ironically, who had the last word, just as New England, the daughter, had gotten the final speech in the poem Anne had composed six months earlier. Compelled to elegize her mother and to give voice to her unsung and quiet talents, she wrote “An Epitaph on My Dear and Ever-Honoured Mother, Mrs. Dorothy Dudley, Who Deceased December 27, 1643, and of Her Age, 61.”

In this sad little poem, Anne carefully listed all the qualities for which her mother was respected:

Here lies,

. . . . .

A loving mother and obedient wife,

A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Religious in all her words and ways,

Preparing still for death, till end of days:

Of all her children, children lived to see,

Then dying, left a blessed memory.
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Anne’s evocation captured precisely what a pious Puritan woman should look and act like, but there was an unspoken truth buried in this poem as well. Without Anne’s words, this particular matron might have been forgotten. Anne could see that it was actually up to her, the literary daughter, to make sure her mother left behind a “blessed memory.” Otherwise the grandchildren—Anne’s children and the children of her sisters and brother—would forget Dorothy in a few years. Anne wrote, “As the brands of a fire, if once severed, will of themselves go out although you use no other means to extinguish them, so distance of place together with length of time (if there be no intercourse) will cool the affections.
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IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH
of Dorothy’s death, Anne might have sought comfort from her father, but despite the fact that he declared himself “melted with sorrow,” Dudley was intent on finding a new wife, and with characteristic impetuosity he seized upon a nearby widow, marrying Katherine Hackburne (née Dighton) on April 14, four months after the death of Dorothy.
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Of course, his children could not help but speculate about the duration of this courtship. Had it really only begun once their mother had died? Or had Katherine, his neighbor, been one of those helpful widow ladies who arrived with pie and other comforts to entice the soon-to-be-grieving widower into her own bed?

Whatever had really happened, Anne was aware that she would never know the whole story and it was a fait accompli. Katherine began to produce children with alacrity, and suddenly Anne’s elderly father had a new family. Although this was a fairly common phenomenon in the colonies—older widowers marrying young women after spouses had died—no doubt this was a somewhat alarming and discomfiting experience for Anne.

It must have been impossible not to feel some degree of loyalty on behalf of her mother, who had been so easily supplanted by another woman, and Anne’s next poem would express her anxiety over this idea. Also, Anne might well have been jealous of her father’s new children, although Dudley did his best to reach out to his daughters, writing Mercy that, now that her mother was gone, he would hire her a midwife for her upcoming labor and would also send her a “souce in a bag,” that is, a sausage. He added that he would try diligently to serve as a guide, urging her to let him have “thy letters as thy mother had and I will answeare them.”
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With Anne it was easier for Dudley to maintain his ties. Although no letters exist, Anne refers to their conversations in her poetry on several occasions, suggesting that they had remained in communication about their shared literary passion even after Dudley moved away from Ipswich.
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Still, no amount of contact with her father could make up for the loss of her mother. Racked by grief, probably disturbed by her father’s remarriage, and always highly imaginative, Anne began to picture her own children bereft of a mother, and she realized that she did not want to fade away as her own mother had. She obsessed over her own demise, dwelling on the tears and sorrow of her husband, not to mention the looming threat of a “step-dame” for her “little babes.”

Pregnant again in 1645, she penned a mournful dirge to Simon called “Before the Birth of One of Her Children.”

How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,

How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If any worth or virtue were in me,

Let that live freshly in thy memory

And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,

Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.

And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains

Look to my little babes, my dear remains.

And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,

These O protect from step-dame’s injury.
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Although in this poem she vividly imagines the aftermath of her own death, Anne writes with the same passion that inspired her other love poems to her husband. She wants to make sure Simon will not behave like her father, hastily installing a new wife into their household. She tells Simon exactly how to remember her, begging him to go on loving her as though she were still alive. Through Simon’s continued attachment to her, she will be able to live on in spirit and still be the mother and wife of the house. It was hard, after all, to contemplate surrendering control of your affairs when you had single-handedly run your complicated household and raised five children from diapers to their first lisps of the Puritan-sanctioned catechism. Anne did not want some other woman to step into her shoes and take over her family.

She also hoped that her children would honor her merits, not for her own sake, but for theirs and for the sake of the colony in general. The upcoming generation in New England needed the example of a pious mother to follow, just as she had needed Dorothy. In a later poem, Anne would return obsessively to this same theme and instruct her sons and daughters, now grown, to tell their own children about her and to pass on the lessons she taught. Conceiving of herself as a mother bird to baby birds now grown, she wrote:

When each of you shall in your nest

Among your young ones take your rest,

In chirping language, oft them tell,

You had a dam that loved you well,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .